South Wales £25m housing framework launched

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A £25 million framework agreement for the housing and public sector in South Wales has launched this month.

The Open Spaces Neighbourhood Development Framework, which will run for four years comprises 35 suppliers, three quarters of which are Welsh companies.

The agreement was established by RCT Homes - Wales’ largest social housing provider - in collaboration with Tai Calon Community Housing, and comprises service lots for professional services, hard landscaping, soft landscaping, civil engineering, fabrication (street and play furniture) and grounds maintenance.

The framework, which was a result of a full European tender, will allow registered social landlords and local authorities in Wales to access an OJEU compliant list of contractors offering a full range of services to meet the new need in the housing sector.

RCT Homes says it took the approach to work collaboratively and offer the framework out to the sector in order to save resources in the sector, reduce the tender burden on organisations and create an efficient framework process that helps organisations to save time and repetition.

Karen Field is group procurement manager at RCT Homes. She launched the framework along with Tai Calon Community Housing. She said: “Many RSLs don’t have a dedicated procurement function and so committing to a full OJEU tender process for each contract can be very resource intensive and time consuming.

"RSLs that choose to access the framework will benefit from a legally compliant arrangement, competent professionally accredited suppliers, competitive market rates and the delivery of community benefits. Partner RSLs can opt for direct supplier call off or a mini bid exercise that RCT Homes will manage on their behalf, for a small percentage throughput fee.

“The new framework is quite unique as we have combined our external work requirements with professional services so users of the framework can access suppliers from architects and planning/cost consultancy to external groundworks in effect providing a ‘one stop shop – basket of goods’ to cover the full range of external development requirements.”

Andrew MacDougall, environmental improvement project manager at Tai Calon Community Housing, said: “Although Tai Calon has its own dedicated procurement team, the opportunity to work collaboratively with RCT in developing this framework was very attractive to Tai Calon. Rather than both organisations working separately on their own frameworks and wasting resource, we were able to combine our knowledge and experience to ensure quality and value for money for our communities by leveraging our joint purchasing power due to the volume of work involved.

“With Tai Calon being more advanced than many other RSLs in Wales in terms of neighbourhood regeneration , this now means we can procure the services required to deliver environmental improvements in our communities in a more efficient, cost effective manner via a fully OJEU compliant framework.”